At 42, Olympian Elva Dryer Returns to the Marathon

The 2000 and 2004 Olympian hasn't raced in four years.

Elva Dryer, a 2000 and 2004 United States Olympian on the track and a 2:31:48 marathoner in Chicago in 2006, hasn’t raced since 2009. But on October 6, at age 42, she’ll line up at the USA Masters Marathon Championships at Twin Cities.

Was she inspired to make a masters comeback by the terrific year that Deena Kastor, her occasional training mate of yore and colleague on U.S. national teams in track and cross country, has been having since turning 40 in February?

“I have been so out of the loop in the last three years that I don’t know everything that’s been happening” in the running world, Dryer says. “I knew she was near 40, because I’m a couple of years older than her. But it actually didn’t dawn on me that she probably is over 40, right? Some days I don’t even check my personal email. I don’t necessarily know who’s in the game.”

Dryer began a full-time administrative job at her alma mater, Western State Colorado University, in 2009, and gave birth to her daughter, Marina, the following year. For her, life has been elsewhere since her days as a pro runner ended.

A winner of two NCAA Division II cross country and four 3000-meter track titles at Western State College (as the Colorado school was then called), Dryer was very much in the game at the early part of the millennium, when, turning pro, she ran 15:03 for 5000 meters and 31:21 for 10,000, and competed in the 5-K at the 2000 Olympics (as a semi-finalist) and the 10-K at the 2004 Olympics (she was 19th).

As Running Times observed in 2007, “There may be no one on the running circuit with more friends, or who is better loved, even by those she has left in her dust.” No amount of sweetness could stave off an inopportunely timed respiratory infection that scuttled her attempt to qualify for the 2008 Olympics in the marathon. Her last elite race was the national 20-K championship in 2009.

Now, she’s occupied with a three-year-old daughter and a 40-hour-a-week job at Western, which is at 7,700 feet of altitude in Gunnison. “My official title is program coordinator of the university center, which is our student center, and manager of the Aspinall-Wilson Center,” a facility which, according to its website, can ”host your business meeting, conference, workshop, educational seminar or special event such as a wedding or reunion.” She makes abundantly clear, “I take pride in my job.”

All that makes for a far more crowded day than Dryer knew in her elite athlete years, and one with myriad distractions. “It used to be I had the luxury of just sipping my coffee in morning, going for my run, stretching, and watching CNN or The Weather Channel,” she remembers. “Now I’m like, ‘You know, I have no idea what’s happening in the world. If I need to know, please tell me.’ I have to go about my day and get done what I have to get done. And I’m okay with that.”

Still, she never really turned her back on running. Dryer ran through the first seven months of her pregnancy, “until my belly got too big and my heart rate monitor didn’t fit,” as she recalls. Two months after giving birth, she settled into running five days a week, “trying to still keep it in my life just for the sake or health and fitness. I still to this day feel best if I run, as most people do who have discovered running. It just becomes part of your life.” She adds, “I still had some structure to my training, more to keep myself mentally sharp and engaged.”

Why the step back into racing at 42? A friend of Dryer’s in Gunnison, Maren Eberly, had also had a baby, had returned to running, and began talking to her about racing. “I wasn’t sure if I could do it," Dryer admits. "People ask me, ‘Can you just do it for fun, jump into a 5-K?’ Well, I mean, I can, but if I’m going to do it, I want a personal challenge. So that’s what this is.”

“This” is that masters marathon in the Twin Cites. "The summer going into the fall is the best time of year to train here” in Colorado, Dryer observes. Twin Cities “is one of the marathons I had hoped to do during my elite career,” she says. “It’s always a juggling act to fit in all the races that you want to do, and that was one that I didn’t get to.”

Preparing for her first marathon since a disappointing 2:38:50 in Boston in 2009, Dryer finds, “I’ve made good progress. It’s a whole different territory and the game is different for me, but this is good.”

Marina’s maturation has also made the marathon venture feasible. “The first two years, I was literally attached to her. Now she has her own food,” laughs Dryer. ”The biggest problem is that she’s so active. I did a workout this [Saturday] morning, came home, had some breakfast, and then we went to the park for an hour and a half. She needs that. It makes for busy days 'cause I want her to be active.”

After “waffling on whether to get back into racing again,” Dryer discovered “a mindset” that worked, and she's back up to 80 miles per week. That’s close to what she did for her debut marathon, that 2:31:48 in Chicago. “It was all probably 80 to 100. For my others, I went way over.”

Her busier life may be a boon in regards to her training. “I had way too much time on my hands as an elite athlete running full-time. It was easy to go overboard,” Dryer remembers. “Now, when I’m in workout mode, it’s very specific. I know what I need to do, I do it, I get out, I go home, and then I recover.

“Just recently, I’ve been a little surprised, like, ‘Wow, that went well,’” she says of her preparation for Twin Cities. “It’s been easier than I thought. It’s not like I have to do this because a sponsor asked me to do it. I’m choosing to run this marathon as a personal challenge, and I will do what I can to be good as I can be.”

Her debut in Chicago at age 35 led many observers to believe she’d be a serious contender for the 2008 U.S. Olympic team as a marathoner. “I got sick and things didn’t pan out,” says Dryer, who quit the Trials race at 19 miles. “I probably should have dropped out sooner. My husband [and coach, Russ Dryer] pulled me off the course.”

She never again fully hit her stride as a professional athlete. “The rest of the year, from, that point, I just struggled. The effort was 100% but I wasn’t getting the results,” she says.

But regrets are few. “I ran well into my 30s. I was 39 when my daughter was born in 2010. I took advantage of my window of opportunity to maximize my potential,” Dryer says. “I ran professionally from when I graduated from college in 1996. I didn’t struggle with, 'Oh, is it the right time' to move on to other things.

“I’m glad I had the opportunity to experience running at the elite level because it’s like nothing else,” she says. The roar of the Olympic crowds in Sydney and Athens, “that’s all stuff that I will carry with me forever,” she says.

“But I’m happy that I’m on the other end of things, too," Dryer says. "There are so many things I didn’t do then that I get to do now. My mom did her first 5-K. She was walking, I was pregnant, and I walked it with her and my sisters and nephews. That’s something I wouldn’t have done when I was an elite runner. I’d say, 'Sorry guys, I have to go do my own workout.’ It was selfish, but you have to be. It was about what do I need to do. Since then, I have more flexibility.” Getting ready for Twin Cities, she mentions, “I still run with Marina in the babyjogger a lot.”

Long coached by her husband, Dryer, for her first marathon as a master, says, “I am coaching myself. He’s coached me so many years, so much that I’ve learned a lot and feel confident. With my juggling act due to my job and my daughter, it’s just easier to do it on my terms. If I’m overly exhausted, I may switch things around. I feel good about it.”

She’s spent her whole life at altitude, and Gunnison is more than 2,000 feet higher than the running mecca of Boulder. Dryer says, “You have to still train your legs to turn over at the speed you want them to go at sea level. If you’d be doing mile repeats at a desired pace, maybe at altitude you’re doing 1200s and you can still hit the pace. I can be cardiovascularly strong, but my legs are going to need to turn over.” She does miss “the ease of some of the things I used to do, like to run a 60-second quarter-mile. I can’t do that now.”

The remaining weeks before Twin Cities will give her a better idea of what to expect in her marathon. Dryer guesses it will be slower than her 2:31:48 PR and better than 2:38:50, her worst marathon finish.

Dryer says she doesn't know if she'll keep racing after Twin Cities.

“I’m going to take it one race at a time,” she says. “We get into the winter season here, when it becomes more difficult to train. I don’t have the luxury or flexibility to leave town as I used to. [As a pro] I could go to training camps, I could go to altitude in Mexico,” or New Mexico. Heading to Minnesota “will be the first time I’m leaving my daughter with my sisters, so it’ll be the first time I’m away from her,” says Dryer.

October 6 will go a long way toward whether that becomes a routine, and whether Deena Kastor has a challenger as the best American female masters marathoner.